Tories have driven down the costs

THREE years ago the Conservative victory in the council elections heralded a revolution in Hammersmith Town Hall.

Radical change has meant our services have improved (as measured both by independent inspections and resident satisfaction surveys) while we have driven down the costs. While council tax bills in the rest of the country have gone up and up, ours have gone down and down.

This has been proving popular and other councils across Britain now look to us as a model as what can be achieved. While Labour councillors have fought this efficiency drive relentlessly, the leader of the Labour Group, Councillor Stephen Cowan, now complains we haven't gone far enough. Never has the road to

Damascus been more congested.

Mr Cowan's comments are prompted by a report I asked for as chairman of the council's value for money scrutiny committee on the training budget.

It shows there is scope for savings by scrapping superfluous training programmes.

But already far greater rigour is applied than under the previous Labour administration - when Mr Cowan was the cabinet member for housing.

We have already reduced the total training spend by 27 per cent since 2005-06 - Labour's last year in power.

Spending on this has gone down from £1.4m to £1.1m a year. The real costs, and the real savings, can be doubled because of the cost of people being away from their work when they go on courses.

More tightening up is taking place.

All requests for staff training in children's services must now be approved by the director. We are also planning to share training provision with Kensington & Chelsea and Westminster for the adult social care workforce.

It is also right that if we as councillors are looking for restraint from council officers on their training spending, then we should set an example. Spending for this year on councillor training has been cut to just £1,585.

Also, it is wrong to suggest Labour councillors have been excluded from spending in this area. Most of those who asked for places in the "questioning skills" training, which took place last year, costs totalling £1,200, were Labour councillors (Cllrs Cartwright, Powell, Dickenson, Homan and Umeh).

Also, there was only one councillor, the Labour member Councillor Dame Sally Powell, who felt the need to charge the council taxpayer for IT training. Her bill is £488. How very grand. The other 45 of us have worked out how to send emails without making a claim on public funds.

The council leader Stephen Greenhalgh has not charged the council taxpayer a penny for attending training conferences - while the Labour opposition leader Stephen Cowan spent £149 of our